Abstract : A contour-tracing technique originally devised by Clemens and Mason was modified and used with several different classifiers to recognize upper case handprinted characters. Recognition accuracies obtained compare favorably with other published results, particularly when additional simple tests are performed to differentiate commonly confused characters. One suboptimum classifier, in addition to yielding near optimum performance when tested on training data, uses much less statistical information than the optimum Bayes classifier and is significantly better than the optimum classifier when training and test data are limited. (Author)